Christie’s to Sell 100 Zabludowicz Works in London as Market and Politics Converge
Christie’s will auction 100 works from the Zabludowicz Collection in London this month, dividing the sale between a high-value live auction and a smaller online offering that begins at just £500. The two-part dispersal arrives at a moment when the market for ultra-contemporary art has cooled sharply, and when the family behind one of London’s most visible contemporary art collections has spent years under public scrutiny.
The sale, titled “Beyond Ordinary – Then. Now. Next. Works from the Zabludowicz Collection,” opens with a 56-lot live auction on June 25. Christie’s has estimated that session at £12.7 million to £19.4 million, with blue-chip names including Philip Guston, Damien Hirst, and Richard Prince among the highlights. A second, 44-lot online sale is expected to bring in another £292,000 to £435,400 before it closes on June 30.
The timing is notable. Auction houses have been trimming their offerings of ultra-contemporary art, defined as work by artists born in 1974 or later, as demand has weakened. In the latest May auctions in New York, there were 121 such lots, down 19 percent from a year earlier and 50 percent below the 2022 peak, according to the Artnet Price Database.
Christie’s has framed the Zabludowicz sale as a straightforward generational transition, a carefully edited transfer of assets to Anita Zabludowicz and Chaim “Poju” Zabludowicz’s four children. But people familiar with the family say the decision also reflects a more personal exhaustion after years of tension with parts of the art world over the family’s ties to Israel.
The Zabludowiczes began collecting in 1994 and built a holding of roughly 8,000 works by about 600 artists. In 2007, they opened Zabludowicz Art Projects in a former Methodist church in Camden, creating a nonprofit venue that became a fixture for exhibitions, talks, parties, and residencies. In its final year, the space drew nearly 14,000 visitors across 20 exhibitions and events, according to U.K. filings. The family also staged projects in New York and ran a residency program in Sarvisalo, Finland.
For years, the couple occupied a rare position in London: not only as collectors, but as taste-makers with the scale to shape careers and institutions. That standing shifted after 2014, when Boycott Divest Zabludowicz began criticizing the Zabludowicz Art Trust and the family’s political ties. The group’s campaign gathered more than 800 signatories, including 27 art organizations and about 775 individual artists.
The family gave up its London exhibition space in September 2024. Christie’s says the current sale reflects a planned handoff to the next generation. Yet the broader context suggests a more complicated story, one in which market contraction and political strain have converged around a collection that once helped define a particular era of contemporary art in London.
